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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => "Global pathogens and $a[GMO]s",
	'<{subtitle}>' => 'Written in <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> of <a href="http://www.uopeople.edu/">University of the People</a>, finalised on 2016-10-19',
	'<{copyright year}>' => '2016',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<h2>The flow of people and goods</h2>
<p>
	Diseases have long been known to spread along trade routes.
	Now trade routes (and travel routes) are faster than before, are traversed by more people, and get people to their destinations quicker.
	A human being can travel from one point on earth to any other point in under a day and a half! This has a number of implications.
	With such widespread travel, infectious diseases travel great distances in very little time.
	It takes so little time to travel, in fact, that people often have time to pick up a disease in one part of the world and spread it in another part long before they start showing symptoms themselves.
	Travelers have no idea that they&apos;re releasing a pathogen into a new environment until it&apos;s too late!
</p>
<p>
	This flow of people, and especially goods, makes modern life possible.
	For example, because of trade with countries in the opposite hemisphere, who are experiencing the opposite season, it&apos;s become possible for people to eat fresh fruit and vegetables any time of year.
	Fruit and vegetables can also be shipped to places that are too cold to grow fruit at any point in the year.
	Tropical countries near the equator are even able to grow food for the world all year long.
	It can be argued that the manufacture of goods should become more localized like it once was.
	However, some things just can&apos;t be done locally or can&apos;t be done locally year-round.
	Likewise, travel to a distant country can be good for business or pleasure.
	Reducing the flows of people and good between distant nations would be a step backwards.
</p>
<h2>The spread of food-borne illness</h2>
<p>
	It is often least expensive to import our food from other countries.
	Unfortunately, in developing countries, there often aren&apos;t as strict of regulations in place to prevent food from becoming contaminated.
	As a result, food-borne illnesses are a bigger problem in those countries, and when other countries import food from those developing countries, they bring any infectious disease-causing pathogens within and on the food along with it.
	Immigrants from poorer countries may even prepare our food locally, but these immigrants often aren&apos;t paid well and don&apos;t have basic health care or paid time off.
	They have no reason to take the day off when sick, and because they&apos;re handling the food of so many people, these workers become an easy point from which illness can be spread.
	Even with strict regulations in place though, illness pops up.
	Whenever food items are exported from a country that is suffering an epidemic, those infectious agents cross the border along with the food and contaminate the country that imports them.
</p>
<p>
	Centralization of food distribution is another issue that presents new hazards.
	In the past, food was distributed much more locally.
	When a food-processing or distribution center became contaminated, it would infect the local population.
	However, now when a food-processing or distribution center becomes contaminated with infectious agents, the effects are much more far-reaching and can have a global impact.
</p>
<h2>Mitigating the spread of disease</h2>
<p>
	It&apos;s not the carrying of pathogens during travel between countries that is the most damaging factor in terms of health though.
	These pathogens just expose how bad other parts of the system are.
	Instead of trying to keep people out of other countries, we need to work on ways of helping people deal with pathogens in a more effective manner.
	Improving living conditions will help take care of the problem of disease.
	Malnutrition and exposure to the elements can have a big impact on one&apos;s health.
	When malnourished, one&apos;s body doesn&apos;t have the resources that it needs to put into keeping their immune system at peak performance, so they can&apos;t fight off pathogens as effectively.
	Likewise, without proper shelter, the resources that the body does have are used to keep the body from freezing to death instead of being used for the immune system.
	Working conditions and rate of pay need improvement in many countries as well.
	Without a decent wage, getting decent living conditions, such as proper food and shelter, can be very difficult.
	We also need to improve access to clean water and sanitation.
	cleaning up sewers and stagnant water can do wonders for removing certain disease-carriers from your living environment, such as mosquitoes.
	With living conditions and pay improved, people including those that process food be less likely to fall ill.
	When they do fall ill though, with higher pay and paid time off, they&apos;ll be able to afford to take time off and avoid contaminating the food that they work with and infecting other people.
</p>
<p>
	One obvious mitigation technique for dealing with the spread of illness is to improve access to health care.
	This may seem obvious, but it&apos;s more important than you might think.
	In medicine, there&apos;s something known as &quot;herd immunity&quot;.
	Basically, herd immunity is the concept that every member of the herd that is immune to a disease improves the health and safety of every member that <strong>*isn&apos;t*</strong> immune.
	If a person&apos;s immune system is able to fight off a pathogen, that person won&apos;t be spreading the pathogen to other members of the community.
	This concept doesn&apos;t even only apply to outright immunities.
	With proper health care, people will be spreading diseases for a much shorter period of time and less people will become infected.
	Preventative health care is absolutely vital for keeping diseases under control.
	It&apos;s been shown that lack of access to preventative health care leads to massive outbreaks of disease, which can be easily prevented.
	Though less vital, health care after having become infected is also important for preventing further spread.
	One of the major contributing factors to the lack of availability of health care in poorer countries can be traced back to the international financial institutions.
	These institutions have a tendency to place the economy ahead of public health when setting up their projects to &quot;better&quot; a country.
	The irony here though is that when public health suffers, so does the economy.
	When people are feeling under the weather, they aren&apos;t as productive as they otherwise would be.
	If the international financial institutions want to stabilize and improve the economies of poorer countries and prepare these economies for integration with the global economy, an important first step is to focus more on public health improvement.
</p>
<p>
	It&apos;s true that globalization has lead to an increased spread of pathogens, but pathogens aren&apos;t the only thing that globalization has spread.
	It&apos;s also spread medications and medical knowledge! As the world becomes more integrated, we are facing more threats, but we&apos;re also being handed more tools to fight off these threats with.
	It&apos;s too late to attempt to stop the spread of disease by reversing globalization.
	Even if it were possible to sever the ties between the citizens of all countries overnight, all that that would serve to do is restrict access to the tools and skills needed to get disease under control.
	Instead of trying to prevent the flow of diseases between countries by closing borders, we need to instead focus on eliminating diseases globally.
	We&apos;ve eradicated smallpox.
	Smallpox can never come back because it&apos;s extinct.
	What would happen if we focused on one disease at a time and tried to cure everyone of it? We could start with diseases for which there&apos;s a known cure, but that not every patient has access to the known cure for yet.
	Malaria and tuberculosis seem like good candidates for this.
	$a[HIV]/$a[AIDS] would have to wait until we find a cure, and cholera might not be such a problem once we improve living conditions and access to clean water.
</p>
<p>
	My sibling is a research scientist working on malaria treatments.
	They said that in addition to needing to dedicate more funding to research, we should be trying to work on researching methods of disease treatment that actually function in countries that need treatment the most.
	For example, someone that my sibling knows is working on a very quick method of diagnosing malaria using powerful electromagnets.
	However, people in poorer countries can&apos;t afford to maintain these powerful magnets, which must be kept powered on even when not in use.
	Their diagnostic method is extremely useful here in the United States, aside from the fact that we don&apos;t have many cases of malaria here to diagnose.
	In poorer countries though, such a test couldn&apos;t be performed.
	Things such as lack of refrigeration should be taken into account as well.
	Poorer countries don&apos;t have a way to keep medicines cold, so we need to put research toward treatment options that won&apos;t be damaged by heat.
	Finally, we need to try to find treatment methods that are easy for untrained people to administer.
	We can&apos;t always send someone to administer treatments, and misused treatments often cause more problems than failing to administer treatment at all.
	(A.
	Palmer, personal communication, 2016-10-15)
</p>
<p>
	Another issue that must be dealt with if we are to stop global disease is that of medical patents.
	Patents of any kind hurt the field to which they apply to, creating monopolies that benefit individual people or companies and eliminating the competition needed to keep prices low and production efficiency up.
	In the case of medical patents, drugs are often made unavailable to the poor because they can&apos;t afford the steep markup that the drug companies impose.
	With more competition in drug production, availability and affordability of vital medicines would be much more widespread.
	Some countries have been granted exceptions to medical patents, but this isn&apos;t enough.
	As the patent exceptions only apply to drugs produced within the country, the companies in richer countries have no motivation to work on developing new drugs that they can sell to the poor countries.
	Instead, they spend their time and resources working on medications for diseases that rich countries have, even if a cure already exists for them, simply because the existing medications are too old to be patentable.
	Without a monopoly on a given drug, they have a much harder time overcharging for it, but given a legal framework that would allow them to gain a monopoly on a different drug that they can overcharge for, their resources are spent on that which will make them more money at the expense of everyone&apos;s quality of life.
	(The Economist, 2015)
</p>
<p>
	Travelers often carry diseases, but instead of slowing the flow of travelers, a better idea might be to require that travelers have up-to-date vaccinations, both against diseases from their own country, so they don&apos;t spread these diseases abroad, and against diseases prevalent in the country that they visit, to avoid picking up diseases that they can take home with them.
	Certain diseases can&apos;t really be vaccinated against as easily though, so it might be useful to additionally require that travelers be screened for certain diseases before crossing borders.
	Stopping the flow of diseases does not require that we halt or reverse globalization.
	It&apos;s harder to prevent exported goods from being infected than it is to prevent travelers from carrying disease, but perhaps when living conditions and people&apos;s immune systems are improved, that won&apos;t matter so much.
</p>
<p>
	Finally, and this isn&apos;t one that many people like to hear, we need to work on reversing climate change.
	Climate change is, among other things, changing the habitat regions of certain species.
	One example is the mosquitoes that carry malaria.
	As the globe becomes hotter and wetter, these mosquitoes are becoming more widespread and finding favorable living conditions in many more places.
	Public health is yet another reason that climate change needs to be taken seriously.
</p>
<h2>Genetically modified organisms</h2>
<p>
	Gene manipulation isn&apos;t something new.
	In the old days, is was accomplished using selective breeding, a process that no one seems to question.
	People say that genetic modification isn&apos;t natural, but is selective breeding any more natural? Either way, we are influencing genes and creating new life forms that wouldn&apos;t otherwise exist.
	Genetic modification is simply the next step in that progress.
	An argument against something based on if it&apos;s natural or not is flimsy at best, anyway.
	Do people that make these arguments make the same arguments against computers or the Internet? If we&apos;re trying to go back to an age where things are more natural, $a[GMO]s are the least of our worries.
	With $a[GMO] technology, we can open up the doors to ending world hunger.
	$a[GMO] crops have been made that are faster growing or more nutritious than the crops that we had before.
	Animal farming has long been a huge contributor to climate change, but there are $a[GMO] crops that have been designed to have more protein than their non-$a[GMO] counterparts.
	With the help of genetic engineering, we can develop plants that further reduce people&apos;s dependence on animal-based products.
	Added resistance to parasites can also help reduce waste, so more usable food can be kept.
</p>
<p>
	If we are to continue using $a[GMO]s though, there are certain precautions that we need to take.
	We shouldn&apos;t create only a single verity of each $a[GMO] crop, as a vulnerability to any particular hazard, such as a pathogen that decimates a particular crop, could have devastating effects.
	It&apos;s important that we keep a fair amount of biodiversity to make such problems less likely.
	Additionally, we need to keep a close eye on the environment to make sure that our genetic modifications aren&apos;t causing unintended consequences.
</p>
<p>
	$a[GMO]s do come with a few problems, though these problems aren&apos;t in the $a[GMO]s themselves.
	One of the biggest problems is the patents that surround them.
	Monsanto has been known to sue farmers that don&apos;t even want $a[GMO] genes in their crops for patent infringement if their crops get contaminated with $a[GMO] genes beyond a certain percentage (Amster, 2013).
	If anything, it&apos;s the farmers that should be able to sue Monsanto, but Monsanto has more money and can hire better lawyers.
	Though farmers have tried to sue Monsanto, Monsanto has won these cases.
	Effectively, Monsanto controls a large portion of our food supply (Gillam, 2013).
	Until the patent problem is cleared up, the costs of dealing with $a[GMO] crops will continue to outweigh the benefits that they provide.
	Many $a[GMO]s are also produced to be more resistant to herbicides, which promotes the use of such herbicides.
	Herbicides such as Roundup have been proven to be very toxic to humans (Gammon, 2009), so promoting their use is not a good idea.
	It&apos;s also killing our bees (NYR Natural News, 2014), needed for pollinating the plants that produce out food.
</p>
<p>
	When I first started writing this paper, I was actually against the use of $a[GMO]s for more reasons than just patents.
	I have no problem with them on principle, but I was under the impression that the way in which we implement them was harmful.
	I thought that I&apos;d read that many $a[GMO] crops produce their own pesticides, which is theoretically helpful because then the farmers don&apos;t have to spray these toxins themselves.
	However, that would mean that this toxins are <strong>*in*</strong> these plants instead of just <strong>*on*</strong> them, making it impossible to simply wash the pesticides off.
	Likewise, I&apos;d been told that $a[GMO] crops were unable to produce functional seeds, resulting in a system in which $a[GMO]-using farmers have to purchase seeds directly from companies that produce them each and every year.
	I can&apos;t find any research that actually backs either of those claims up though.
	I&apos;m eager to see what other students have to say about $a[GMO]s in their essays this week, but unless I see some evidence that $a[GMO]s are actually harmful, I&apos;m going to have to consider $a[GMO]s themselves to be fine, though the patents on them are still as noxious as any other patents.
</p>
<div class="APA_references">
	<h2>References:</h2>
	<p>
		Amster, R. (2013, May 15). Patenting Death | Huffington Post. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/randall-amster/patenting-death_b_2878816.html"><code>https://www.huffingtonpost.com/randall-amster/patenting-death_b_2878816.html</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		The Economist. (2015, August 8). A question of utility | The Economist. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21660559"><code>http://www.economist.com/node/21660559</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Gammon, C. (2009, June 23). Weed-Whacking Herbicide Proves Deadly to Human Cells - Scientific American. Retrieved from <a href="https://scientificamerican.com./article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p/"><code>https://scientificamerican.com./article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p/</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		Gillam, C. (2013, June 10). Monsanto Wins Lawsuit Filed By U.S. Organic Farmers Worried About Seed Contamination | Huffington Post. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/monsanto-wins-lawsuit_n_3417081.html"><code>https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/monsanto-wins-lawsuit_n_3417081.html</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		The LEVIN Institute. (n.d.). Microsoft Word - health2011 - glob101healthandglob.pdf. Retrieved from <a href="http://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/126121/mod_book/chapter/94474/glob101healthandglob.pdf"><code>http://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/126121/mod_book/chapter/94474/glob101healthandglob.pdf</code></a>
	</p>
	<p>
		NYR Natural News. (2014, August 11). Is Roundup killing our honeybees? Retrieved from <a href="http://www.nyrnaturalnews.com./article/is-roundup-killing-our-honeybees/"><code>http://www.nyrnaturalnews.com./article/is-roundup-killing-our-honeybees/</code></a>
	</p>
</div>
END
);
